Ubuntu 11.04 May Still Get Nouveau Gallium3D

Canonical has been using the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for providing 2D acceleration and kernel mode-setting for NVIDIA hardware on an open-source driver by default, but they haven't yet shipped the Nouveau Gallium3D driver that would provide OpenGL acceleration support (along with OpenVG, OpenGL ES, and the other APIs accelerated by Gallium3D state trackers). Their reasoning for holding back on shipping the Nouveau Gallium3D component by default (though it is available through an experimental package) has been that the upstream Nouveau developers haven't yet declared it stable and are unwilling to take bug reports against the driver. Canonical though may be in the process of reevaluating their Nouveau Gallium3D decision and this 3D driver could end up appearing in Ubuntu 11.04.

At the past Ubuntu Developer Summit it was decided not to ship the Nouveau Gallium3D driver by default due to the aforementioned reasons, even though Fedora (among other distributions) are beginning to ship this driver so NVIDIA customers can have a capable open-source driver with 3D acceleration whether it be used by a compositing window manager or for gaming and other tasks. Nouveau 3D may still be quite slow in relation to NVIDIA's proprietary driver, but it isn't too slow for desktop compositing and lightweight gaming (with ioquake3-era games). Using a recent Linux kernel and Mesa release (circa Mesa 7.9+ and Linux 2.6.35+) this driver is also quite stable, we have not seen it render anything really wrong or produce artifacts, nor have any other problems been encountered. It may not yet support the very recent NVIDIA GPUs, but the Nouveau Gallium3D experience is quite good especially with GeForce 6 through GeForce 9 series graphics processors.

Canonical is now reconsidering whether to enable this driver in their Ubuntu 11.04 stock installation based upon Unity, the new desktop for Ubuntu. With Unity, Compiz is required as its window manager otherwise Ubuntu will fall-back to providing a classic GNOME desktop. Canonical sure would like to have Unity running on as many desktops as possible and by ignoring all Ubuntu users with the open-source NVIDIA driver would void it of being seen in many places, until NVIDIA's proprietary driver is installed.

As a result, Canonical now seems to be contemplating whether to enable the Nouveau Gallium3D Mesa driver so their Unity desktop can be used, especially from the Ubuntu LiveCD. As an alternative to enabling the Nouveau Gallium3D driver, another option they are exploring is making it easier to use NVIDIA's proprietary driver from a LiveCD. To accomplish running the binary driver from an Ubuntu Desktop LiveCD, however, that would require being able to uncleanly load the Nouveau DRM/KMS kernel module, build the Nouveau kernel module, and then load in NVIDIA's blob. The Nouveau option is a much better choice, but again Canonical is uncomfortable with Nouveau being "unsupported" and they don't want to invest in working on this community, reverse-engineered driver.

This work is talked about by Canonical's Christopher James Halse Rogers on Ubuntu-X. Canonical still has their plans to deploy Wayland eventually with the Unity Desktop and for that they will need kernel mode-setting with 3D acceleration, etc. Nouveau provides this where as NVIDIA has no plans to support Wayland right now. As a result, Bryce Harrington has already responded signaling a greater interest in getting the Nouveau Mesa driver working rather than investing in a way to get NVIDIA's binary driver to work more easily and cleanly off a LiveCD.

Let's hope Nouveau Gallium3D is turned on by default in Ubuntu 11.04, which will be released next April. Doing so will not only help users of the Unity desktop, but also those running GNOME 3.0 with the GNOME Shell and KDE users with KWin or once Plasma begins using more OpenGL.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.